The Secret Life of Bees

Lily is a girl is a girl with a large heart who desperately wants to love and be loved. Moreover, she demonstrates a strong longing for a maternal figure in her life by her frequent day dreaming about her deceased mother. Lily has not found support from her father or community and can only turn to her housekeeper who has little power in the racist South. In the passage on pages 12 to 15 of chapter one, the audience begins to see just how deep this need for love and change is.
Lily thinks of her mother in a positive light. She thinks her mother’s name, Deborah, is the “prettiest name” she’d ever heard. She sees her mother as a gentle, loving person who “was a lunatic when it came to saving bugs.” She is quite infatuated with the three “last traces of her mother” that she stole from the attic: photo, gloves, wooden picture of Mary. Lily looks passed her mother’s weak chin in the photograph and claims her mother was “above-average pretty.”
The audience sees Lily’s yearning for a maternal connection as she “examined every possible similarity” of herself in her mother’s picture. Lily tries to connect with her mother in assuming that her mother would have “wanted [the photo from the attic] taken.” Also, Lily manages to squeeze the information of her mother’s burial ground from her father, and even gets “worked up thinking [she’d] found a grandmother.” Lily expresses discontent not having her mother around to drive to cheerleading practice or to share in her female maturation. After her first menstruation, Lily “didn’t have a soul to show.” Lily wanted to go every place her mother had ever been.
Lily was not satisfied with her present living environment. Her father was abusive and unsupportive. He “refused to speak” Lily’s mother’s name and would get upset when hearing it. By imagining her mother “waiting at the car fender for love to come to her, and not too patiently,” the audience understands that Lily is expressing her own impatient wait for love. Lily often escapes from her father’s meanness, the memory of the afternoon the gun went off, and the world by going to her “special place” that no one else knew about. She claimed it was her “plot of earth.” She thought about what kind of place “Tiburon, S.C.” was and used it as another escape from her current location. She knew it was not far away and promised to go there one day when she was grown-up enough.
The three items Lily keeps in a tin box are very telling of her. The photograph of her mother symbolizes the mother she always wanted. The “white cotton gloves stained the color of age” represent her sweet, innocent nature that has been tarnished by unfair circumstances she is not responsible for. The “small wooden picture of Mary” with black skin had “on the back an unknown hand had written ‘Tiburon, S.C.’” which allowed Lily to imagine a place that offered change and hope.
Finally, the audience knows that Lily is not reserved to live out her days unhappy when she uses the phrase “which offered me genuine hope for my future.”